Founding Security Engineer

Valkai•San Francisco, CA

28d•$200,000 - $350,000

About The Position

As a Founding Security Engineer, you will build the security foundations that allow our AI systems to operate safely in demanding enterprise environments. You will own security across our product, cloud infrastructure, and internal systems, writing code, shipping controls, and working directly with engineers to identify and fix vulnerabilities. You will also own customer trust: explaining our architecture and controls to enterprise security teams, leading security reviews, and turning customer requirements into practical improvements. You will work directly with company leadership and partner with Engineering, Product, AI Research, Sales, and Legal to set priorities and build the security function as Valkai grows.

Requirements

Security engineers who ship: You have built and operated production software or security tooling.
You can investigate an issue, write the fix, and own it through deployment.
Product and cloud security depth: You understand application vulnerabilities, cloud architecture, identity and access, secrets management, data flows, and tenant isolation.
Customer credibility: You can explain technical security decisions clearly to enterprise customers, work through diligence questions, and distinguish implemented controls from future commitments.
Practical judgment: You prioritize risks based on impact and exploitability, make clear tradeoffs, and help engineers build securely while keeping product development moving.
Clear collaboration: You work well across technical and business teams, document decisions, and follow through on remediation.

Nice To Haves

You have been an early security hire at an enterprise software or AI company.
You have hands-on experience securing AI agents, sandboxed execution, enterprise integrations, or multi-tenant systems.
You have found and remediated vulnerabilities through penetration testing, bug bounty work, or security research.
You have supported SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audits, built compliance automation, or worked on AI governance and ISO 42001.
You have worked with life sciences organizations, financial institutions, law firms, or other highly regulated enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

Guide Valkai's security roadmap. Assess our product, infrastructure, and internal systems, prioritize the highest-impact risks, and own remediation.
Build and strengthen authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, secrets management, encryption, and data-handling controls. Contribute production code and infrastructure changes alongside Engineering.
Secure AI agents and their integrations, including tool permissions, execution boundaries, access to customer data, and defenses against prompt injection and data exfiltration. Partner with AI Research and Product to test failure modes and implement safeguards.
Establish security logging, actionable detections, incident response procedures, and vulnerability management. Investigate issues, coordinate response, and implement fixes that prevent recurrence.
Own enterprise security reviews, technical diligence calls, questionnaires, and customer audit support. Partner with Sales and Legal to make accurate security commitments and resolve deployment blockers.
Build and maintain our Trust Center, architecture overviews, security documentation, and reusable customer responses. Automate evidence collection and review workflows.
Drive security readiness for SOC 2 and ISO 27001, coordinating evidence, remediation, and external auditors or specialists as needed. Partner with Product, AI Research, and Legal on AI governance and ISO 42001 readiness as enterprise requirements evolve.
Select security tools and external partners, track improvements, and help define future security hires as the function grows.